Reflections: Doing History in and out of Academia

My trajectory has been out of the ordinary. Rather than reciting the externals, I shall try to recall the inwardness of a series of happenings.

From 1954 to 1957, when my wife Alice and I were in our twenties, we lived in what would later be called a “commune” in the hills of northeast Georgia. Almost every morning I got up at 5 a.m. to milk the cows. When other members of the community turned their faces toward fundamentalist Christianity, we left.

We had two small children and not enough income. Then the U.S. Supreme Court decided that I and several dozen others had been wrongly discharged from the United States Army in the early 1950s because of our alleged radicalism and were eligible for benefits from the G.I. Bill. I was working as a neighborhood organizer for the University Settlement House on New York City’s Lower East Side. One day in the subway, it came to me that I did not want to chaperone teenage dances for the indefinite future. I had almost enough credits for a master’s degree in city and regional planning. But what caught my attention was the question: Was there a time when the purported ideals of the United States of America were more in evidence than in the late 1950s? The period of the American Revolution seemed an obvious possibility.

Dutchess County Tenants and New York City Artisans

At that point, I went to Columbia University seeking graduate degrees in American history. I decided to test the hypotheses of Charles Beard and Carl Becker by inquiring into the politics of Hudson Valley tenants before, during, and after the Revolution. I focused on Dutchess County where, in 1766, a man named William Prendergast had led a tenant revolt. He had been sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason. (The sentence was not carried out because Prendergast’s wife Mehitabel, a Quaker, galloped to New York City and received a stay from Governor Moore pending an appeal to the king, which was ultimately successful.)

Our family schedule permitted one half-day in the library every two weeks for research. In retrospect, I consider that a blessing. As I watched over children at a Central Park playground or did the dishes, I was able to turn over endlessly in my mind what the evidence had and had not thus far established.

My master’s essay won a prize and was published. More important, what I found in that research was a complete surprise and had a major influence on the rest of my life, in and out of academia. I had expected to find that a cohesive demographic group, tenants on the Dutchess County “manors,” rebelled in 1766 and then pursued a single, coherent strategy during the Revolution and the debate over adoption of the United States Constitution. This turned out not to be the case. Sure enough, tenants in southern Dutchess County rebelled in the 1760s and petitioned during the Revolution for confiscation of Loyalist lands (I held their petitions in my hands). But in northern Dutchess County, near the present site of Bard College, tenants on “Livingston manor” behaved quite differently. The Continental Congress had strung nets across the Hudson River, weighed down with lead, to impede the passage of British ships. Livingston’s tenants went out on the river at night, stole the lead, made bullets from it, and then rose up in arms in support of the King of England.

What was going on? There was only one plausible explanation. Tenants in both southern and northern Dutchess County were not distinguished from one another by any obvious characteristic. What differentiated them was the politics of their landlords. The southern Dutchess landlords werel Loyalists. In northern Dutchess County, the largest landholder was Robert R. Livingston, a delegate to the Continental Congress and a steadfast, if very conservative, patriot. The generalization that embraced all these facts was: The politics of a Hudson Valley tenant in the American Revolution depended on who your landlord was. Whichever side your landlord elected to support, the tenant opposed...